Using the World Wide Web, Part One

Some Introductory Terminology. If you are familiar with the World Wide Web, you can probably skip this section entirely. If you are not, you might find it helpful to have a few key terms defined clearly and simply.

The internet itself is simply a vast collections of computers that are linked together--sometimes through actual cables such as fiber optic lines, sometimes over telephone lines--and which are able to communicate with one another. The internet arose out of the need for communicating complex data between scientific research sites. One of the leaders in the development of the internet was the CERN, a European high energy particle physics lab. Scientists there and at a number of other research institutions, including several in the United States, needed to be able to share complex scientific data quickly and easily. The internet was born as a network of linked computers capable of sending text and files back and forth to one another.

The scientists’ communications needs grew quickly, and they soon needed a way of communicating complex equations and illustrations. In order to facilitate this process, they began not only to link their respective computers to one another physically, but to establish a common language for communicating with each other and to develop software which "spoke" that language. The common language came to be known as Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) and the software came to be known as a web browser. This is the advent of the world wide web, which is a subset of the internet that supports graphics and more complex text than the simple text found on traditional terminals.

One of the attractions of the internet for scientists and academics in general was e-mail, which offered fast (almost instantaneous) and cheap (at least, no one ever saw the bill) communications with anyone on the internet. Those connected to the internet found that they could send mail back and forth to colleagues all over the world without incurring expensive phone or postage bills, and they knew the mail would be there when the recipient next check his or her mail box.

E-mail has remained largely unchanged since it was instituted, although there are now better readers to download, read, compose, and save mail. It has not, however, developed in the way that the web has--graphics, color, audio, and video are all awkward to use in e-mail. However, one early development of e-mail has had a profound impact. List servers are an extension of e-mail which allow a person to subscribe to a list on some specific topic. For example, I have a list server for Ethics Updates. Whenever I add a significant amount of material, I send a message to the list, and it goes out to everyone the list. List servers are an important and highly efficient way of communicating with a large group of people. A single message automatically goes to everyone.

List servers are not just for one-way communication. Anyone can send a message to the list, and then everyone on the list receives it, and anyone on the list can send a reply back to the list--again, with everyone receiving it. I regularly use list servers with my courses, requiring all student in a course (sometimes across several sections) to subscribe to the list. Then if anyone has a question, they send it to the list. I may be the first to reply, but sometimes other students answer the question before I do. This is a highly efficient technology, and most universities are willing to establish list servers with comparatively little fuss. Now I have found that committees are beginning to use them as well. It makes commenting on drafts of proposals, etc. easier for many, although it is still limited by the text-based character of e-mail.

Newsgroups. Newsgroups are like list servers, but have been integrated into the World Wide Web much more effectively than standard list servers, which function more like glorified e-mail. Browsers now support newsgroups directly, and your browser will—if you ask it nicely—automatically download the messages in any newsgroup to which you are subscribed. These can be a valuable resource.

Threaded discussion groups have become increasingly common on the web. If you would like to see extensive examples of these, look at the discussion groups on Time Magazine’s site. Threaded discussion groups differ from list servers in several respects. First, there is no need to subscribe in order to participate. Anyone who logs onto a discussion group page can contribute. Second, discussion groups are usually embedded in web pages in such a way that you can easily see all the previous entries on the topic. (It is possible to do this with list servers, but it is much more difficult to do so.) You can choose to respond to a specific entry (continuing a thread) and introduce a new issue (start a new thread). The current drawback of threaded discussion groups is that they do not automatically notify participants when someone else has commented on their message (or later down the thread). In order to continue to participate, you must revisit the site.

Browsers. World Wide Web browsers were originally developed to read documents (often scientific) on the web. Today the two major browsers on the web are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Both of these browsers easily read standard HTML (hyper-text markup language) documents. Currently, "standard" HTML is version 3.0, although drafts of the next version (3.2) have been widely circulated. At this point, Microsoft and Netscape are competing with each other to dominate the browser market. Part of this competition is that each company’s browser has begun to support non-standard features that are hoped to give it an advantage over its competitor. Netscape was the first to offer Java support (more on this below), while Microsoft introduced ActiveX controls. At its worst, this results in features of some sites only being available in a particular browser. Presumably, this will eventually become standardized in such a way that the major browsers will be able to handle whatever is available on any site. Microsoft now supports Java, and Netscape is in the process of adding ActiveX to its browser.

Developments in web software are now coming fast and furious. One of the ways that Netscape developed for dealing with this situation was plug-ins. These are programs that can be added to Netscape to handle special types of files, such as audio or video or 3-D files. Internet Explorer is now supporting plug-ins and their equivalents as well. The result is that browsers can be updated without modifying the basic browser; plugs-ins can simply be added for new types of files.

One of the more important plug-ins has been Adobe Acrobat, which supports PDF files. PDF files contain far more advanced formatting than is possible on the web, and allow the complex formatting of original documents to be transferred much more efficiently and accurately to the web. I hope that PDF or something like it is eventually simply built into the major browsers.

Java and ActiveX. Many people have heard about Java, fewer about ActiveX. Both are programming languages which offer the possibility of making the world wide web more interactive. From the standpoint of someone who just uses the web, there is no need to worry about these things. Those who set up web sites will find that they offer exciting possibilities for making site much more interesting and flexible.

Url’s, Addresses, and Bookmarks. Every page of every site that you visit on the world wide web has an address, called a uniform record locator (url). Url’s are simply addresses. Although they might initially seem forbiddingly complex, they are often straightforward. Most begin with "http://", which simply tells your browser that the protocol it should use for loading that page is called "hyper-text transfer protocol." The next part of the address is usually "www," which simply stands for world wide web. This is followed by a period, then the name of the site as a whole (e.g., "nytimes," "pathfinder," or—at my university "sandiego" for "Academic Computing University of San Diego). This is followed by another period and a suffix—usually "edu" for educational institutions, "org" for non-profit organizations, "gov" for government, and "com" for commercial enterprises. Several new suffixes are in the process of being added. Also, many countries add a suffix to indicate their country; these are usually standard, two letter abbreviations of the type found in the Olympics. This may be followed by a forward slash, in which case it indicates a subdirectory at that site. If an address is sending you to a specific page, it may end with the name of that page, which will have the extension "htm" or "html."

The internet offers a vast and ever-growing set of resources on the topics discussed in this book. The types of resources available fall into several categories: search engines, dedicated topic sites, dedicated news sites, government resources, and newsgroups. Each of these is approached in a somewhat different way, so let’s consider each separately.

The internet is a vast network of inter-linked computers. It is essentially anarchical in character: sites appear, change, move, and disappear with disconcerting speed. It’s always difficult to keep up with the changes, and it is usually hard even to find out what is out there. In order to deal with this problem, a number of sites have developed what are called search engines. I have listed a number of these search engines on my site [give link]. Let me comment on two of them.

One of the oldest search engines on the web is Yahoo. Founded by a couple of Stanford students, Yahoo categories sites according to topics. It is a good starting point because you don’t receive too much information, and you usually find the most important sites for any given topic you are considering. Whenever I am beginning research on a topic, I start with Yahoo.

Alta Vista is the search engine that gives the most extensive and most complete search of the web. One of the things I have students do when giving them an introduction to the web is to type their last name (especially if it’s not an extremely common one like "Smith" or "Jones") into the search engine and see how many entries (or "hits") it returns. Usually Alta Vista returns far more than you want.

Complex Searches. If your search return too many hits, narrow it down through an advanced search. The trick in using it effectively is to use advanced searches in which you specify the conjunction or disjunction of several terms. Most search engines support Boolean searches. A search on abortion and the Supreme Court will return far fewer hits than one just on abortion.

How Search Engines Work. It’s helpful to understand how search engines work. A search engine such as Alta Vista, which is maintained by Digital Equipment Corporation (and thus has a lot of computing power behind it), begins by sending out what are called spiders on the internet. A spider is a program that crawls along the web (hence its name), looking for links. It simply starts at some random page, reads that page, indexes every word on the page and notes the address at which it occurs (the url), and then follows one of the links on the page to the next page, reads and indexes that, goes on to the next page, etc. These spiders crawl the web twenty-fours hours a day, seven days a week, reading and indexing every word they find. Every word (with its corresponding address) is then automatically entered into a master word list. Then, when a user types in a search term (e.g., the word "Hinman"), within a matter of two or three seconds Alta Vista returns a list of every instance it has found of that word on the thirty-two million pages of the Web. The results appear so fast because the search has already been done in advance--the process of indexing the Web effectively conducts the search on every word that occurs on any page of the web.

If the process of searching the web seems daunting, consider letting someone else do it for you. Many of the issues in this book are already the object of dedicated web sites. A dedicated web site is simply one that is devoted to a single topic (or a specific set of topics). Typically, such sites have already done a lot of the work of searching the web, and using them can save you hours of time that would otherwise be spent with search engines.

Some dedicated sites may be structured with a particular point of view. Many sites dedicated to abortion, for example, are clearly "pro-life" or "pro-choice." Typically, although not always, these sites will concentrate on providing links to internet-based resources that are supportive of their stance. It is always helpful to find sites with opposing point of view, for taken together they then usually provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the web resources available on a given topic.

In Ethics Updates, I have tried to indicate the major dedicated sites for most of the topics in applied ethics. If you find—or have—a good site that I missed, please let me know by e-mail (hinman@sandiego.edu) and I’ll post a link so that everyone can benefit from it.

Daily News Sources. Many of the topics covered in this book deal with issues that are often in the news. The web offers us a number of excellent resources for keeping track of recent developments in regard to these topics. CNN has an excellent site, as does Time Magazine, which on-line has a daily as well as a weekly edition. The major networks are now developing news sites, including a collaboration between Microsoft and NBC. These sites contain much material that never finds its way into the primary medium. In addition to these sources, many internet providers offer access to wire service news providers.

Newspapers. Several major newspapers are now on-line, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times does not contain all the articles that appear in the painted edition, and it is available only for the day on which it has been published. The Los Angeles Times seems to contain almost all of its paper edition, and currently permits users to search back issues. (They indicate that eventually this will only be available to those who pay a fee.) The Washington Post contains some of the paper edition and some material not contained in the paper edition. The Times of London is also available on-line.

One of the most exciting developments in the on-line newspaper sites has been the introduction of special reports. The Washington Post is in exemplary in this regard, with first-rate reports on a number of issues relevant to this book. For example, they published a five-part series, "Justice by the Numbers," on mandatory sentencing guidelines in the federal courts. This is a first-rate series, and the five principal articles are supplemented by a number of sidebars. There is plenty of substance, and it is presented in a graphically powerful way. Similarly, the Post has recently posted the series by

Magazines. Some helpful magazines are also available on-line. The Atlantic Monthly has an excellent site, and it has organized back issues by topic and in some cases added hyperlinks as well. The National Review is available on the Pathfinder site, and recent issues of Michael Lerner’s Tikkun are now available as well. The Boston Review has recently been added to the list of print-based magazines that also appear on-line.

Government Resources. The federal government maintains a number of excellent resources. Thomas is a wonderful resource for legislative information. The Library of Congress card catalogue is available on-line, and there are excellent guides to federal resources of all types. The Supreme Court does not have its own site, but Cornell University’s School of Law maintains an excellent database for decisions in this decade, and Northwestern University supports Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!, a site which contains audio files for the oral arguments before the Supreme Court for a number of courts.

If your search is successful, you will probably find a lot of interesting and helpful stuff. What do you do then? Here are some suggestions.

The first thing I do whenever I find something interesting is make a bookmark. This let me be able to return to the site easily without even typing an address. Most users quickly discover that they are accumulating a lot of bookmarks. The easiest way of dealing with this is to establish folders for each topic (e.g., I have folders for "abortion," "euthanasia," "death penalty," and the like). This reduces the clutter considerably. There are also programs available to manage bookmarks, and some of these will even automatically notify you when a site has been updated.

Be careful of saving bookmarks on some news sites, including most of the daily newspapers on-line. Often the address for an article from today’s paper will be stored under a generic address for that day—the next day some other article will be at that address. Newspapers retain these articles, but they may not be available to the public at all or they may be moved to another address as part of their archiving process. If the url or address has something like "year/month/day" in it, a bookmark will probably not bring you back to the same article on the next day.

Bookmarks are useful and save space, but the more reliable way of saving something you find is to store it on your own disk. If you find something particularly interesting that you want to keep a copy of, simply save the document to disk. If you are at your own computer, save it to your hard disk; if you are at someone else’s computer (for example, at the computer lab at your college or university), then save it to a floppy disk that you can bring home with you.

There are several reasons for wanting to keep a copy of a page. First, on some sites, pages are only available for a limited time--if you don’t save it now, you may not be able to access it later. The New York Times, for example, is available on the web, but users who do not pay for this service can access only the current day’s articles. Log in every day, save the articles you want, and you have a clipping service that’s much neater than using a scissors on the daily paper. Second, even if a site does not have a policy of time-limited availability, things may change. Something that had been available for a long time might be taken off the web--or the entire site might be closed and changed to a limited-access site. Saving helpful documents now insures that they will be available later. Third, the documents may be long and you might want to work with them off-line in order to avoid paying a connection fee for your reading time. Depending on the cost of your connect time, this can save you a fair amount of money.

Saving articles to disk is a fast, efficient, and neat way of keeping up-to-date on a particular topic. There are no messy pages of newspaper to stuff into manila folders, and you don’t get any ink on your fingers! I have a directory on my computer called "My Library," and then I have sub-directories entitled "Abortion, "Euthanasia," "Punishment and the Death Penalty," etc. When I find interesting articles, I save them to the relevant directory. With the advent of long file names in Windows95, I simply highlight the title of the article, copy it (with Control-C), and then paste it (Control-V) into the space for the file name. (Tip: make sure you delete any illegal characters in the title such as a semicolon.)

Sometimes you will find yourself working on a computer that is not your own. This may be at a school computing lab, a friend’s house, or some other situation. Here’s what to do: either use your own floppy disk or use e-mail to yourself.

Saving Bookmarks and Files to Disk. Typically, it is possible to save bookmarks to a floppy disk. In fact, what some students do is to carry their bookmarks on a floppy disk so that they can just pop it into a computer. Then they can navigate using their own bookmarks (without tying the url’s) as well as save bookmarks for new sites they have found.

The same technique works for saving entire files to a floppy disk. It’s easy to do, fast, and efficient. Then just transfer the files to your hard disk when you get home. Currently, the easiest way to read them is simply to load them into your browser, which is probably either Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer. If you decide it’s really important, you can even print it out.

Using E-mail. A second technique to sue when working on a computer other than your own is to e-mail url’s and documents to yourself. This can be a very helpful way of saving important material when you’re working away from home. Most browsers have an option under the file menu called something like "mail to." Just mail the document to yourself, and you can save it to your own disk on home when you retrieve your e-mail.

If you mail url’s or files to yourself from, say, a computer at your university’s computer lab, be aware that many browsers require that you first enter your own user name and e-mail return address before they will send mail for you. Don’t forget to remove these from the machine when you have finished your session!

In order to help students feel at ease with the internet, I typically give them an internet research project in the second week of the semester. I usually take my students to our computer lab, give them an introduction to the web site and the basics of browsing the web, and then give them the following assignment. I ask them to find five resources on the web relating to any of the topic in the course and to explain why each is a helpful resource. They must find sites not listed on my pages to insure that they don’t just copy five url’s off my own pages. (This also occasionally helps me to find new sites.) The assignment must be submitted by e-mail. Perhaps partially as a result of having been required to do internet research, many of my students now include footnotes to web resources.